Cajun Adventure, Post-Hurricane Rita
(continued)
Monday: Dolores and Huey
I think it was Monday morning that we finally met our dorm-mate, Sheri. Up until then I was beginning to think she was the Invisible Woman. She was very young, only 31, which shocked me because for some reason I expected her to be old, like me. She was tall, fresh-faced and beautiful, with boy-short hair. She looked like a college athlete. When we met her, she was almost two-thirds through her three weeks as a volunteer, experiencing extreme homesickness for her husband and 11-year-old stepdaughter back in Maine. She was also experiencing some frustration with the efficiency of UMCOR, her “parent” volunteer organization. They weren’t always on top of having jobs ready for her.
“I hate to sit around and do nothing, because then I get more homesick,” Sheri said. “I can sit around back home. I came here to work.”
Like us, Sheri had felt the call to go in person to work in Louisiana. Like us, she spent a ton of time searching the Web to finally find a place she could work. She had taken a month unpaid leave of absence from her job in order to volunteer. Like us, she had purchased her own airline ticket.
However, unlike us, she was also buying her own food. We were lucky to have volunteers from Lafayette Diocese providing us with a stocked refrigerator and chicken, beans and rice, casseroles and salads – saving us a lot of cash. Sheri hadn’t been introduced to Cajun dancing. Instead, she had bought a month membership at the local health club, where she worked out at night and enjoyed a hot tub to sooth her muscles sore from pounding nails. Sheri’s assignment was in Abbeville, not far from where we’d be working. We invited Sheri to join us dancing on Friday night. She said she’d love that.
We bid Sheri a good day and walked downstairs to meet Sister Ancilla. Anna had to do some last-minute organizing that made us five or eight minutes late. I fretted to Anna about this later in the car. “You don’t keep nuns waiting,” I told her. “You don’t understand nuns cuz you never had any for teachers. Nuns always do things right and they can be a little scary.”
Anna was flabbergasted that I would be afraid, even a teensy bit, of a nun. She never had the experience I had in the 50s, a group of 60 second-grade classmates in one room, an unsmiling black- habited Sister Yolanda keeping order through sheer fear.
Sister Ancilla, a smiling nun in street clothes, drove ahead of us, leading us to our assignment in New Iberia, about a half-hour away. All along the way, the land was FLAT, as it had been everywhere we had driven so far. (I thought about lyrics from a Steve Riley’s song, “La terre si plat” – The land so flat.) Here and there we saw fields of sugar cane, a bunch of one-foot plants at this point – not tall rows as they had appeared when Mike and I visited during the month of September.
Dogs and kids, kids and dogs, laughing and barking. They were our greeters when Anna and I arrived at Dolores and Huey’s home. It was January 16, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, so the kids had a break from school. Some ran, one rode a mini-bike around FEMA trailers and debris still strewn on the rural property since the water surge caused by Hurricane Rita flooded their homes four months earlier.